A New Sempervivum Bed.
The previous owners of this property must have had a lorry load of large gravel, for want of a better word, delivered and laid down at some time. The material ranges in size from 20 mm to 100mm. It is best described as the kind of gravel used in the first stages of road making. This was spread out over the soil at the entrance to the garden, presumably to allow the parking of vehicles. Over time the gravel was pressed into the soil and the area became grassed over.
One of the problems/pleasures of gardening here is the number of stones we can find in and around the garden. The kind of stones I mean are rather like the ones you find on North Wales beaches, round and from all over the place. Once upon a time our garden was at the bottom of a lake. These stones were deposited during the last ice age. They range in size from fist-sized to needing a bag trolley to move. We have managed to find uses for all the ones we have found so far, but there are always just a few left over. so, each time we complete a project., we have to think of something to do with the remainder.
Near to where the road gravel was deposited we used a lot of stones as a sort of mulch round a flowering cherry. We decided that, since the grass quality in this area was so poor, we would remove some more of it and create a beach style area which could be used to grow hardy succulents such as Sempervivums.
The first step was to spray the grass with weed killer. I say grass, but there is probably less grass than there is of the usual lawn weeds plus some ragwort and a few primroses.
The process took a few weeks as I wanted to be really sure that all the weed roots were affected by the weed killer. Perhaps I should have left the rest of the grass alone, but the moss was in desperate need of dealing with. Once the area was adjudged to be clean I removed the turf.
The turf is a valuable commodity so it was stacked to break down into usable material at some point in the future.
Digging over the ?soil? was extremely difficult as it was full of road gravel and very compacted. It is no wonder the ?grass? struggled to grow in this area.
Eventually the area was turned over and the largest of the road gravel removed for use elsewhere. The soil left was still full of smaller pieces of gravel which is not a problem since the things I intend planting do like a well drained soil.
The next stage was to put the mowing strip in place along side the new edge to the lawn. This is a 10 cm. wide concrete edging stone. They do save a lot of time as we do not have to go round and edge the lawn very often. Fortunately the new line is actually shorter than the old so we did not have to buy extra edging pieces.
Construction could now begin. I collected the ?field stones? as they are called round here and tipped them onto the soil.
It was then just a case of putting the field stones where I wanted them. I used some of the larger ones to make ?islands? in which to plant the succulents
.
The area completely covered with the field stones. You can see the spaces left for
planting.
I have a large number of Sempervivums in need of planting so they were used almost straight away. Then the whole stretch was given a covering of 10 mm. gravel to fill any gaps between the larger stones.
